When a person compares or confronts two things, what he is doing is comparing. This action consists of analyzing the characteristics of two or more objects or situations to establish similarities and differences and develop some type of assessment.
This comparison work and the result of it are known as collation. For example: “I have already received the samples from the different suppliers: now I am going to make a comparison to determine which is the company that can offer us the highest quality”, “Consider all the available options and make a comparison that allows you to know which is the most convenient”, “No comparison is necessary: at the end of the day, Chinese products are always the cheapest”.
According to abbreviationfinder.org, the notion of collation is also used to name a match or a sports competition. What the teams do is confront each other to try to stay with the victory: “In a match that was played at the Azteca Stadium, the local team defeated Venezuela 4-1 and advanced to the next phase of the cup”, “El colejo it was very even and it was only decided in the last minutes, when Aruztelli scored a headed goal”, “The team will only play its next match in ten days, when they have to face Deportivo Villamor”.
Also, this term is part of two of the many constructions that give name to the symbol generally known as seen, which has an appearance similar to the letter “v” and is used to record that a task has been carried out or that a task has been carried out. line of text has been read, among other possibilities ; the expressions in question are checkmark and checkmark. It is worth mentioning that in certain countries, the check has a different meaning, since it indicates error, as it happens in Sweden and Finland.
On the other hand, the concept of collation of letters appears in the field of law. When, in the context of litigation, a private document whose authenticity is doubtful is exhibited, it can be subjected to an expert examination that receives the name of letter comparison, carried out by a graphology technician.
File matching is a widely used practice in various development fields and basically consists of comparing a copy of a document with its original version. In computer programming, for example, it is common to organize work so that many versions of the same program are generated throughout the development cycle, and sometimes it becomes necessary to contrast a file with one of its previous instances to find the root of a mistake.
It should be noted that, in the same way that writers discard words, expressions, paragraphs or even entire chapters of their works before coming up with the final form of a literary creation, programmers often make drastic changes to the code of a program, and some Sometimes this clipping causes problems that were not anticipated. In very complex systems, there are a large number of relationships between its components, making it difficult to extract one without affecting the rest.
There is a wide variety of applications for collating text files, both paid and free, although in many cases they are simply plug-ins for word processors or editors. Such is the case of Notepad++, a popular open source editor that offers endless tools, among which is a file comparer. Some of the options available to analyze the result of the collation are the possibility to align the matches, ignore the spacing and detect the changes of place of text portions.
